Towards the Sky Again, 1997 - 2011

Towards The Sky Again is a series of photographs that raise questions about the ways humans engage with and make connections to the natural world. The images, made over a fourteen-year period (1997-2011) show oddities, interventions in the landscape and fabricated realities. We see contradictions and contrasts between interior and exterior worlds, and in environments hovering between the genuine and the artificial. Urban life becomes a human playground loaded with cultivated natural forms; the landscape around us contains layer upon countless layer of human intervention. There is an undercurrent, a line of investigation into the elemental—terra, aqua, aer, ignis—questioning the role of resource. From what (or where) do we draw strength and sustenance? Do artificial/mediated forms of nature offer a satisfying substitute for the actual? Where does wilderness begin and end?   

The photographs, as diptychs, grids, and large singular images, offer multi-layered readings through their groupings, relating to the videos on view in The Screening Room. 

Both the photographs and videos examine ambivalence towards nature and animals, and the complex and contradictory ways it is woven through the fabric of culture. I'm interested in the voracious appetite humans have for (re)connection with the natural world, whether in flesh or in reproduction, with admiration or obsession.